[566] had by my very highly valuated friend Karl Mannheim^a, who came as a refugee to England in 1934 and '35, and introduced "sociology of knowledge"---which was his very special interest---namely trying to find out which sociological group is responsible for a special ideology. This of course means UNDERCUTTING the certainty of these ideologies. So the English people, the educated groups

and the professors, to a great extent, resisted his influence tremendously. And only in the catastrophes of the Second World War and a little bit after it---actually only in the years [after] his death, he became generally acknowledged as an important man even for the English situation. Now this was the resistance of conformity against analysis of the roots of this conformity. And you can find this always, that very self-certain groups are extremely sensitive if they are sociologically analyzed, because they feel that this undercuts the unbroken self-identity of their existence, it undercuts their natural conformity. Of course such resistance ALREADY transforms conformity into conformism^b, and the situation in England is very much in the balance now. Now in this country, the European individualism never was very strong. The so-called American "rugged individualism" is an economic factum [?] and has very little to do with ideology, with ideas generally, with the idea of the individual as developed in the romantic and

post-romantic traditions, and Bohemian traditions, which we can call post-romantic traditions in Europe. Very little of this existed genuinely in this country. The economic individualism did not express itself in intellectual individualism.. The most rugged individualist became the most pious members of some church and gave millions and billions of money either to these churches or other